What's That Keyboard Character Called?

Do you know the proper names for all of the characters on your keyboard? What are the characters you get when holding down Shift and the number keys? Or the key to the right of the 1? Take this quiz and see if you can identify all 10 keys that have tricky names. Then learn the proper names and uses for these characters.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. So do you know the names of all the characters on your Mac keyboard? Ones like these. Take this quiz and see how well you do.
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So while most people know some of these characters very few people know all of them. Pause this video and write down what you think these characters are called. Then see how you do as we go through them.
Let's start with an easy one. This character is Shift 8 and it is called the asterisk. Sometimes it's also simply called the star. It's used for a kind of footnote notation. You put an asterisk after a word or phrase and then you have a footnote at the bottom of the page. In computers it's used very commonly for multiplication since there's no multiplication symbol on the keyboard. So you want to say 6 times 9 you say 6*9. It's also used in some cases when you're doing searches for a wildcard character.
Next we have Shift 7 which gives us this character. The ampersand. It's commonly used for the word and especially in titles for things. You'll also find it, sometimes, in URLs as a separator between different variables in an URL for a webpage and also in coding particularly two of them together to represent logical and.
Shift 6 is this character called the caret. It's also sometimes called the circumflex. It looks like an accent mark but like with a lot of these you don't actually get the accent mark by typing this character. Instead to get an accent mark you hold down the key, like say the e key, until you see a list of variations for e with different accent marks and then you select one. Now the caret is commonly used in math on the computer to represent power. So if you want to say 2 to the 5th power you would do 2^5. It's also used in coding.
Next we have this character which is Shift 3. You've got it right if you said pound or hash. But the official name for it is supercool. Octothorpe. I've also heard this symbol referred to as number. Sometimes it's used as an abbreviation for the word number. It's also used before an actual number if you want it to be pronounced number something like number one. Of course we commonly see this today as the first character in hashtags. It's also commonly used for the symbol for sharp in musical notation although most fonts have a special character for that.
This is Shift 2 on the keyboard and we use it all the time. Believe it or not it's just referred to simply as the At symbol. There is kind of an official name but it's kind of a new name called the ampersat. It's also called a few other things. We use it, of course, in email addresses. It's also used when you're writing sometimes to just denote the word at. Like you might say January 1st @ 7 p.m.  It also is used in twitter handles and other social media names.
Next we have one that has it's own key. It's the key to the left of the number one and this is referred to as Acute. It's also sometimes called the Grave which relates it to the accent mark that looks the same but of course you don't get the accent mark by typing this. Sometimes this is called the Back Quote or the back single quote or the back tic. Since this has its own key you'd think it would be used for a lot. But it's actually not used very much at all. Sometimes it's used a little bit in coding but really there's very little reason to use it.
Now if you use the Shift key with this key you get this character.  The Tilde, at least that's how I pronounce it. This also looks like an accent mark but again it's not a key you would use to make that accent mark. It's used in math to represent an approximate number. So you might use this character and then 5 to say approximately 5. It's also used when talking about the Home directory on your Mac or any Unix like operating system and sometimes for web server addresses too. Sometimes you'll see this in file names. Windows used to use this as a character when a file name was too long. It would just cut it off and put this character at the end.
Now we have some keys that are on the right side of your keyboard. These are known as simply Brackets or sometimes square brackets. Individually they're sometimes referred to as open and close, like open bracket and close bracket or left bracket right bracket. In writing these are used to enclose bits of missing text. So if somebody were to speak something and leave out a couple of words, or something obvious like identifying a person in a quote, you would put square brackets around text like that to show that the writer has inserted that text in there. They're also used in coding particularly when using arrays and in math formulas as well.
Now using Shift with the same keys on the keyboard you get these. These are called Curly Brackets but sometimes they are also called Braces. Similarly use the word open, close, or left and right to identify them individually. Now these aren't used much in writing but in coding they're used all the time. They're used to enclose bits of code in a function, in a loop, in conditional statements like if, then, etc. 
This brings us to our last special character. This is Shift and backslash. It gives you this vertical line. It's called the Pipe but it can also be called vertical bar. It's not used much in writing but sometimes people use it to divide things in a list. In coding however it's commonly used to denote that you want the output of something sent to a particular place or sometimes it's used, particularly two of them together, for the logical operator or.
So how many of these did you get right? You really don't need to know the names of these but it's useful to know the real names for these especially when you want to tell somebody exactly what key to press in a certain situation.
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Comments: 4 Responses to “What's That Keyboard Character Called?”

Ian MacGregor

6 years ago

I remember in some Linux distributions you could hold down the CTRL key for 3 seconds and an on-screen keyboard would pop up showing you where all of the special characters were. This would aid in knowing which keyboard combinations to press to obtain a certain character. Is there such a key in macOS? I tried holding down the Command key but that didn't seem to be the one. I always have trouble remembering which keys to press to get the Apple character. Thanks for the quiz!

Gary Rosenzweig

Ian: Just press Control+Command+Space. Then you can browse and search tons of special characters. You can also go to System Preferences, Keyboard, Keyboard, Show keyboard and emoji viewers in menu bar. Then click on that menu bar icon and choose Show Keyboard Viewer.

Gary: Excellent suggestions, thank you! Control+Command+Space is now my favorite keyboard shortcut!

David Girling

I had a go at your keyboard character quiz and was alarmed to find that I was getting different results on my Apple extended keyboard. It finally dawned on me that you were using a US keyboard while I was using the UK version. I then tried all the keyboard characters using a combination of the shift, cap lock and alt keys which revealed lots of characters that I could have done with in the past typing academic and foreign language texts. Anyway, thanks for the tip about Control+Command+Space.

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What's That Keyboard Character Called?

Comments: 4 Responses to “What's That Keyboard Character Called?”

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